


Willow's Adventures In Slumberland

by beer_good



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Alternate Season/Series 03, Background Relationships, Coma, Community: whichwillow, Gen, Libraries, Post-Episode: s02e21-22 Becoming
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-23
Updated: 2018-12-23
Packaged: 2019-09-25 09:23:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17118692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beer_good/pseuds/beer_good
Summary: What if Willow’s coma in Becoming lasted for weeks, or even months? And what if she got to spend it all in Sunnydale High's library, with access to all knowledge known to man?





	Willow's Adventures In Slumberland

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dragonydreams](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dragonydreams/gifts).



**Title:** Willow's Adventures In Slumberland  
**Author:** Beer Good   
**Fandom:** Buffy, s2  
**Pairings:** Background Willow/Oz, Willow/Jenny, Buffy/Faith  
**Rating:** PG13  
**Word count:** ~2750  
**Summary:** What if Willow’s coma in Becoming lasted for weeks, or even months?  
Written for the [Which Witch Ficathon](https://whichwillow.livejournal.com/).

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.  
\- Jorge Luis Borges

**Willow's Adventures In Slumberland**

Willow woke up on the library floor with a groan of pain, because that's how you wake up after being smashed under a bookcase, or under anything really. It took her a while to realize that she wasn't actually in any pain, and that she wasn't pinned under a bookcase even though -

Oh! Vampires in the library! She quickly jumped up and looked around, ready to run in any direction, but the library was completely quiet. Not a soul, or lack thereof, around. "Xander?" No answer. "Giles? Kendra? Bu-" Wait, Buffy hadn't been here, she - Hang on. Willow looked around the library. Something was very wrong. Why would they clean up the library, put all the smashed furniture and toppled bookcases back, reshelve all the books, and leave her passed out on the floor? Because the library looked as pristine as the first time she'd seen it, and not to brag but she knew this library _well_. "Uh... GUYS?"

No reply. No echo, even. This was seriously frickin' weird. She ran over to the doors and pushed them open -

\- only to find herself back in the library again. She tried it several times in a row with the same result. The second she pushed the tiniest bit on the doors, the world would somehow spin and she would find herself back inside the library without catching even a glimpse of what was outside.

Huh.

She spent maybe an hour (there didn't seem to be a clock anywhere) looking for another exit, to no avail, trying to stave off both panic and that feeling that this was somehow really really interesting. She tried going online, but the one computer Giles had reluctantly allowed in here wouldn't turn on. (She also tried walking through a wall, just to check if this was a Halloween thing. It wasn't. Ow.) Then she saw one book out of place: A large picture book lying on the big table. She looked at the cover.

_WILLOW'S ADVENTURES IN SLUMBERLAND_

She took a deep breath and opened it. Inside were illustrations that looked like something out of an old fairytale book, but also instantly familiar. She turned the pages as she started to understand.  
Herself, hiding from vampires.  
Herself, getting smushed under a bookcase.  
Herself, lying in a hospital bed with various machines hooked up, Oz and Xander sitting by her bedside. (She had to reach out and touch them. It was just paper.)  
Herself, reading this very book in this very library.  
The rest of the pages were blank.

So that was it. Like that Billy kid last year, or maybe more like that MacGyvver episode on the cruise ship. She was in a coma, and this was some kinda dream. That was... Well, good to know, she supposed. She wondered if she was dying. She wondered what was going on with the others, with Angelus and ... She tried the door a few more times. She screamed for help, shushing librarians be damned. Cried for a while.

***

OK, work the problem, Rosenberg. No one else is coming for you.

Days passed. Or not really, because there was no way of telling what the time was or even if time was even a thing that was a thing here. She never got hungry or sweaty, never had to go to the bathroom, and after a while that felt roughly like a day she'd... zone out and come to again, which she supposed qualified as sleeping. She looked for ways to get out, tried to fix the computer, tried to remember anything that Giles or Miss Calendar might have said that would be helpful, tried to remember any magic spells (still felt weird, that), tried to simply _wake up_... but it was like she couldn't even figure out what muscles to flex. As far as her senses told her she was completely awake, her whole body was _there_ (yes, she'd checked, ducking behind some shelves in the back because alone in this construct or not you just don't get naked in a library).

(Every day she checked the picture book about her a couple of times. Every time there was a new page, showing her in bed, with various people visiting. She wasn't sure how quickly time was moving in what she insisted on thinking of as reality. Buffy and Joyce visited separately, for some reason. Buffy looked so sad it made Willow cry, but at least she had Giles with her, who looked like he'd been through hell. At least everyone seemed to have survived... except Angelus, she supposed. Kendra wasn't there either, and Willow hoped she'd simply gone home.)

On the third "day" it struck her: You're Willow Rosenberg, you taught yourself to read from Mom's encyclopedia, you've got this. Whatever this place was, it was a library, not to mention probably the best occult library in the... well, within the Sunnydale city limits, at least. There had to be books that made sense of this. She searched through Giles' shelves ( _Esoterica_ , _Occult_ , _Unexplained phenomena_ , _Metaphysics_ , etc), brought a huge stack of books in no particular order over to the table and started reading and taking notes.

She soon noticed that every time she "slept", she'd awake to a clean table and the books automatically sorted onto the correct shelf, by Dewey number and alphabetically by author. This annoyed her at first, but also meant she could more easily focus on one field of study each day, and there was a comfort in knowing everything was in its right place. At least her notes remained, so it wasn't a complete _Groundhog Day_ reset. She'd meant to focus entirely on mystical comas and the like, but books contain a ton of interesting stuff and she often found herself hours into reading up on alternate dimensions, illusions, possessions, worldwalking, dying visions, _un_ dying visions, virtual reality... Now and then she'd think of her friends who must be worried about her and about herself in that hospital bed, force herself to refocus and hurry up and get out of here, only to shortly afterwards find herself furiously taking notes on the real-life implications of artificial intelligence as foreseen by 13th century muslim mystics... She wasn't sure it was right to be _enjoying_ this, but darnit. The library had always felt safe.

At the end, though, she knew an awful lot about all kinds of stuff but was no closer to an answer. Plus most of the accounts were clinically and objectively written by others, rather than by people who had actually experienced it, and the endings usually pretty depressing. Was she supposed to _do_ something, to _learn_ something, or just sit around until her body either woke up or died? She buried her head in her hands and screamed. This wasn't fair. Why couldn't she just _wake up_?

(One day when she opened the picture book, Buffy had came to visit her along with a dark-haired girl, who stood at the back looking uncomfortable while Buffy sat by Willow's bedside. The other girl was fidgeting with something... a stake? So much for Kendra, she supposed, and wondered what had happened to her, and who would mourn a girl who didn't even have a last name... A few days later (how many days in reality?) the other girl was sitting next to Buffy with Buffy's head on her shoulder. They looked... close. Why did that upset her? She didn't think she'd have a problem with that, but darnit, Buffy was _her_ friend and... and... She supposed she wasn't much use as a friend lying still in a hospital bed.)

The next day, she got the few actual spellbooks Giles kept in the library and she wasn't supposed to know about (top shelf in the cage, behind a row of old textbooks). Complete bust. She had no mystical ingredients whatsoever which meant that about 80% of them were out, and the rest were obviously beyond her, because she got no results at all. Or maybe magic simply wasn't an option in the wherevershewas. (Or maybe her Latin just sucked.) It was when she got out the last one that she saw other books behind them. If Giles had hidden those books away that well they had to be worth finding, she thought and got them out.

Oh.

There was a twinge somewhere deep inside when she recognized Je... Ms Calendar's handwriting. A bunch of books of hers, and then several volumes of hand-written journals. The books seemed interesting enough, and included a very modern-looking one called _Magick For Two Empty Hands - The DIY Spellbook_. She thumbed through it excitedly; it seemed to be fairly basic, and held pretty much what it promised - spells that could be performed without any advanced ingredients. But it was the dedication that brought it all slamming back to reality; handwritten in Jenny's hand on the title page.

_For Willow on her 17th birthday. Give 'em hell - Love, Jenny_

Willow's eyes brimmed over and her hands cramped up in fists. Her birthday was August 1st. Jenny, beautiful generous clever Jenny had bought this for her and then... She tried to picture Giles collecting Jenny's books and putting them up there, too heartbroken to read them, or deciding to honor Jenny's wish and saving the book for Willow's actual birthday, and tried to push down the image of Giles reading the inscription and deciding no, better not. _Just wake up and you can ask him yourself._ Still, unfair as it might be, she couldn't shake the image.

The journals seemed to cover all of Jenny's time in Sunnydale, the last date was the night before her death. They were in Romani, but hey: She was in a _library_. She'd spent two years decoding passages in all sorts of dead and demonic languages, how hard can it be to translate a living one? The library had a single English-Romani-English dictionary. She began with the last volume, starting in November of last year, and picked a passage totally at random ("WR", "BS" and "RG" didn't seem like very difficult codes to crack). It was tough going, she knew nothing about the grammar, but the third passage brought up one sentence that she had to double-check several times.

"I think WR may have a crush on me. Don't think she knows it. Will let her figure things out on her own."

She? Crush on Jenny? What, no... Hello, boyfriend. She looked back into the picture book and realised that Oz seemed to be visiting less and less, or maybe the book just didn't show him as often. One of her friends, or her parents, or Buffy's mom was always there, but… She wondered how he would feel. They'd only dated for a few months, he'd never really been part of the gang, it had to be hard to come there on his own, and… And she missed him, and she felt sorry for what he must be going through, and wondered how she herself would handle that, and was angry at all of them for not simply finding a way to get her out, and once again tried to will that sleeping girl who looked like her to wake up. The only result was that she herself dozed off again.

When she woke up, she once again found the table empty apart from the picture book. She ran all over the library trying to find Jenny's books again; the ones on magic had been shelved with Giles' books (they were not his, damnit) and she finally found the journals under Biography. Under C for Calendar even though each volume was signed JK for Janna Kalderash. She yelled at the shelves for a while but didn't feel any better, so she sat down and got to work on the last volume. Several hours later she was working with tears in her eyes, transcribing Jenny's thoughts from her last few weeks. She'd made a huge mistake, she'd messed up everything, and she'd been working so hard to fix it when… But there'd been so much more to her than just that, she'd been so funny and smart and pretty and maybe Willow really had had a crush on her. Kendra dead, Jenny dead, she stuck in this perfectly alphabetized hell while her friends were facing gee-dash-dee knows what outside. She swept the books from the table in anger, then when that didn't help, ran over to one of the shelves (Geography) and swept every shelf until the books were lying in a huge pile on the floor. She sat down and soon, once again, woke up to a perfectly ordered world where every book was back at its perfect place, each 800-page marvel reduced to a code and a keyword and a summary, every life story annotated and edited with a beginning and an end and set in the most appropriate font and bound in leather. Why had she ever loved this place, again? Surrounded by all the knowledge in the world and none of it helping her in the least.

She went over her notes again and again, looking for anything she'd missed, any sort of connection that would go _click_. Nothing. Thumbed through _Magick For Two Empty Hands_ again and… OK, why not. Every good-girl cell in her body screamed no at the suggestion, but hey, if it failed the damn books would probably just end up back on the shelves tomorrow anyway, and the day after that, and the day after that, and the day… They wanted hell? She'd give 'em hell.

A few hours later, she had several shelves' worth of books dumped in a big pile in front of the library doors. She took a few steps back and spoke two words.

"Librum incendere."

The books almost exploded in flames, forcing her to back up all the way to the information desk. She saw pages curling up, words melting into each other, magic and physics and fairytales and demonology all turning into one roaring fire. The flames licked the door, the wall, the ceiling, quickly started spreading to the other shelves. Willow took a last look at the picture book (her in the hospital bed, a doctor standing over her with concern on his face) then threw that too on the fire. She backed away as far as she could, feeling the air grow hot and dry, the smoke driving tears to her eyes and making her cough and maybe this had been a really bad idea and -

***

_-ver spiking, hundred and four -_

_-ode blue, I repeat, c-_

_CLEAR_

_-ble conditio-_

***

Something grabbed her and shook her, not bodily but inside, somehow. A whiff of perfume that she hadn't let herself know that she'd remembered. _Thanks for staying with me. Now go._ Jenny's lips on her forehead, then

***

"Willow?"

She opened her eyes and saw Buffy. Really her, finally, not just a crappy drawing. Buffy held her hand gingerly, as if she wanted to wrap her up in a bearhug but was afraid to break her.

"Oh my god, I'm so glad you're back, I've missed you so much, your parents are on their way here, a-and Giles and Xander and F- uh, everyone, and …"

She squeezed Buffy's hand back (how very weak she felt) and her eyes fell on the weird medallion Buffy was wearing. "Whassat?" Her voice was barely a whisper, and her throat felt like… Well, like she'd been in a fire.

Buffy smiled awkwardly. "Oh, uh, I'm... the mayor of Sunnydale now. Looong story. It's been a strange year. I'll fill you in later, but just… God, I'm so happy to have you back. No, no, don't try to talk, the doctor said it'll be a while before you… but I got you this. You want me to get you anything? Books?"

Willow looked at the notepad and pen that Buffy put by her bedside, then over towards the open door where she heard footsteps approaching. She had a feeling that this wasn't how this story had been supposed to end. But she had a lot of blank pages to fill in.


End file.
